


faites-lui mes aveux

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Theatre, University, opera - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-08-01 04:36:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16277942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: Leah Beecham is cast as Marguerite, and that's only the first surprise that the university Operatic Society production ofFaustbrings with it. And Ellie Everett should probably have kept out of OpSoc altogether if she wanted to avoid Music Department drama, but it's a bit late now, because she's got the part of Siebel...





	faites-lui mes aveux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuroraCloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraCloud/gifts).



My first thought was that it could have been worse. I was on a field trip the week that the elections were held, so I escaped being on the OpSoc committee and therefore had no say in what we did next term. I knew that Charlotte wanted to move away from Gilbert and Sullivan, and there was a rumour floating around that it was going to be something French.

I hoped for _Carmen_ , obviously. If I was going to have to give up Pitti-Sing or Mad Margaret or Katisha then it would be nice to have a shot at a title rôle. (Granted, I had been Iolanthe this last production, but, for a title character, she really doesn't have a lot to do.)

 _Faust_ wasn't too nasty a surprise. I auditioned for both Siebel and Martha. My friend Steve, who was a shoe-in for Mephistopheles, wanted me to get the latter, so we could have the garden scene together, but Siebel has a lot more to do, so I was happy.

Khadijah got the part of Martha in the end, and Harry Gates was Faust. A postgraduate historian by the name of Ben was Valentin, and Wagner was a Fresher named Andy. The Marguerite was a surprise to all of us: a girl called Leah Beecham. I was surprised because I didn't know her; the Music department crowd, because they did.

'She's in chapel choir,' Steve told me the next day, when we met to have a drink and dissect the cast list. 'I don't know how she thinks she's going to find the time to do both.'

'Maybe she'll drop chapel choir,' I said.

'She can't. She's a scholar. And -' he lowered his voice, 'I don't think she could afford to give up the scholarship.'

'Which of us can afford anything, these days?' I asked lightly, and Steve laughed in a way that made me think he didn't really get it.

'Charlotte said she auditioned for Josephine in her first year,' he said. 'She was in the chorus for _Pinafore_ , but hasn't been seen since. From what I've heard she isn't great at acting.'

'Rosie isn't great at singing,' I retorted. 'Maybe Charlotte fancied a change.'

'Touché!' Steve said. 'Well, it doesn't bother me. I've got nothing against the girl, and anyway, all I have to do is drag her down to eternal damnation. You've got to be hopelessly in love with her for three acts.'

'You don't have any more success than I do, if I recall correctly,' I said.

'True.' He grinned at me. 'Maybe I can corrupt you in the meantime, Ellie Everett.'

'Been there,' I said. 'Done that. And you can have your T-shirt back any time you like.'

  
As we got into rehearsals, it became clear that Steve was right: Leah was no great shakes as an actor. Her voice was fabulous, though, and there was an endearing awkwardness about her that somehow worked for Marguerite. She was taller than me by three inches or so, with gingerish hair and a round, anxious face that could broaden into a lovely open smile when she let it – which wasn't often. I was always struck with an urge to give her a hug and reassure her that we liked having her there, which was ridiculous: she was a year older than me, and a music student, and had as much right to be there as anybody.

Still, she always seemed equal parts pleased and bewildered to be singing with us, and Danny, apparently resigned to the fact that this was the best we were going to get out of her, rolled with that.

'Leah... _yes!_ That thing you're doing with your hands!'

'Sorry,' Leah said. 'The thing is, I'm not used to having them free.'

Danny waved his own hands around with great enthusiasm. 'No, it's great! Do that all the way through that bit with Harry.' He turned to me. 'And Ellie, you too, you're great. Just remember, you're a sixteen year old boy, you adore this girl, she can do no wrong in your eyes, she's got you picking flowers, for goodness' sake. Don't ever look away from her. And you want her to know how you feel, but you can't handle the idea of being rejected to your face, so _everything_ is riding on these roses. When they wilt, you're devastated... We'll deal with that bit next week. In the meantime, you can practise gazing adoringly at Leah. Happy?'

'Yes,' I said. I wasn't exactly confident that I could make a convincing teenage boy, but Leah had a lovely voice, and I figured that all I had to do was let my admiration become visible.

Charlotte tapped her pencil on the edge of her music stand. 'Any chance we could get back to the music?'

'Sorry,' Leah said again, though it wasn't her fault.

I supposed she was probably a bit shy. She must have been confident enough in her own singing ability or she would never have auditioned, but she was always a bit withdrawn at rehearsals, never the first to speak.

'I'm not surprised,' Steve said to me in the students' union bar, afterwards. 'She's got a hell of an accent.'

'That's out of order,' I told him. 'Particularly given your own.'

'I don't have an accent!' he said, apparently genuinely surprised.

'Yeah, you do. And it's much more obnoxious than Leah's.'

'Whatever. Is hers Brummie, do you think?'

I kicked him. He finally got the hint and changed the subject.

  
At the next rehearsal I asked Leah where she was from; she said, 'Northampton,' and I resolved to tell Steve that he'd got the wrong Midlands.

  
Before I got the chance, though, I learned something else about Leah.

I'd gone up to the Music Department in the hope of finding a practice room free. There was a bit in the flower song that I just couldn't get – don't ask me why; it should have been easy – and, while I'd been listening to it on headphones over and over again, I knew that I really needed to sing it over and over again in order to get it into my head properly. Nita and Imogen, who I lived with, had been nothing but enthusiastic about my venture into grand opera, but I knew from past experience that my practising the tricky bits got old quickly.

As it turned out, most of the practice rooms were free. There was some kind of concert going on up at the chapel, and (so I'd gathered from Steve) it was not-so-secretly an unofficial try-out for Voces Occidentes. What that meant was that those music students who sang would be up there showing off their wares, and most of those who didn't would be rubbernecking.

So I just put my name down for the 8pm-9pm slot (it was already ten past eight) in practice room A, and sauntered downstairs without a second thought.

I didn't hear anything, not until I opened the door. If I'd realised that it was occupied I would probably have marched in announcing that actually I had this room booked. As it was, I had the door open and was three steps inside before I saw them.

There was a tall, dark-haired girl lounging on the piano stool, her elbow propped on the piano lid. Standing, facing her, was Leah. Her face was red and blotchy, her hair stood out at all angles, and she was obviously in tears.

I froze. Opened my mouth to speak.

Leah gave a tiny, angry, twitch of her head, and went on with what she must have been saying before I came in. 'I could live with the secrecy. I could understand your not wanting to come out. I almost didn't mind your cheating on me. But you've made me lie for you, Gabbie, and I'm not going to stand for it.'

Gabbie's back was toward me, so I couldn't hear much of what she said in reply: just the word 'sophisticated', which seemed to make Leah even angrier.

'You think I give a flying fuck?' she spat.

I knew this was somewhere I shouldn't be. I stepped backwards, as delicately as I could, out of the room, and closed the door on Leah's 'It's over, and I never want to see you again.'

My heart was beating ridiculously fast. I ducked into practice room F, directly opposite, and not a moment too soon. I heard the door of A slam, and then Leah's hurried footsteps and stifled sobs – moving not towards the stairs, as I'd have expected, but further along the corridor.

I supposed she was trying to give Gabbie a chance to get away – or, it occurred to me, maybe she was looking for me. Maybe she wanted to beg for my silence, or explain the scene away, or something.

I thought I'd better let her know where I was, in case she did want to do something like that.

My breath control wasn't going to be great after a shock like that, but I opened the lid of the piano anyway and bashed out the passage I was having trouble with. Then I sang it. Then I played it again, then sang it again. In between I stopped to listen for what was happening outside the room.

Firs there was the door of room A opening and closing. That was Gabbie making herself scarce. _Good riddance_ , I thought, surprising myself with my own vehemence. Then, perhaps ten minutes later, I heard Leah coming back again. I paused between the first and second phrases to listen. She sounded calmer, I thought: the frantic sobbing had subsided to the occasional sniff, and she was walking, not running. I sang, ' _You flowers, revealing -_ ' and struck the A several times as if I wasn't sure of my intonation. I kept my eye on the open door, ready to plaster on an encouraging smile. But Leah walked straight past, towards the stairs, and out of the building.

Nobody was left to hear me sing, ' _\- the way that I'm feeling: take my thoughts, and pass them on..._ '

I went through the flower song a couple of times for form's sake, hamming up the bit about the flowers wilting like nobody's business, and then shut the piano, signed myself out of the building, and walked home, my mind buzzing with what I'd learned.

Looking back, I could almost swear that I noticed that there was something slightly wrong about the campus, its shapes and shadows, but I couldn't have put my finger on what it was.

  
At the next rehearsal, the only thing that anybody was talking about was how the electrics in the chapel had blown midway through the concert. After that, there had been no lights (which explained what was wrong with the skyline) and no organ, and there hadn't been anything for the Voces Occidentes scouts to listen to. Assuming that they were there, which those in the know (I didn't know who those were) swore they were.

'So basically,' Steve told me during the break, 'everyone in the first half was fine, and everyone in the second half is fucked.'

'Which half were you in?' I asked him.

He shrugged. 'First. Not that I'm interested in Voces Occidentes,' he said. 'I'm going -'

'Back to London. I know. So who missed out?'

'Claudette Taylor. A bunch of Freshers. Iggy Garcia. Katie Connery, though she wasn't singing, so it doesn't really make much difference. And Harry.'

I winced. Harry had made no secret of the fact that he was very interested in this opportunity. 'And who was in the first half?'

He closed his eyes and ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke. 'Charlotte. Most of the second years. The wind quintet. And Leah Beecham.'

  
At the rehearsal after _that_ , the atmosphere was appalling. Charlotte was nitpicky and irritable; Harry lost his temper twice; Steve swore at Harry; and even Khadijah snapped at Fran when she played a cue wrong. Danny removed himself from the scene, saying that there was clearly too much to be fixed with the music before we could do anything with the action. He didn't do it very gracefully, either.

Nobody spoke to Leah at all except when they had to. Except me, obviously, and I was pretty awkward because I couldn't forget what I'd overheard, and I supposed that she couldn't forget that I'd overheard it.

  
And I couldn't work out why I was the only one speaking to Leah. Surely nobody else was having to walk the tightrope of wanting to express sympathy and solidarity on one side, and not wishing to tread on the trauma of a bad breakup on the other.

Then there was the question of whether Leah was actually out to anyone except this Gabbie. I thought that Steve would almost certainly have mentioned it to me if he'd known, and he knew most things. Gabbie obviously wasn't out to anyone. All in all, this felt like something that I wasn't supposed to know about. So I concluded that I definitely wasn't meant to talk about it.

I did wonder whether Music in general had found out and taken Gabbie's side; but again, Steve would have told me.

Eventually, I found out where the problem had started. At some point during that week, somewhere in the Music Department, somebody had said, 'You know Leah Beecham's father is an electrician?'

And that was all it took.

  
The full rehearsals were less awkward than the principals' ones, but not by much. The proportion of music students to us lesser mortals lessened, but there were more of them overall, and of course the story spread. Those who had never had a hope of getting the part of Marguerite got hold of the idea that maybe they would have done if _some people_ hadn't used (unspecified) underhand tactics.

I enquired loudly if they were doubting the judgement and perception of their auditions committee, which probably didn't do me any favours. Later I overheard Khadijah squashing the rumour that she'd been passed over because of _my_ unspecified underhand tactics. 'I didn't even go for Siebel,' she said. 'My F sharp isn't that reliable.'

I don't know whether it stuck.

Ben considered the whole thing a storm in a Music Department teacup, and was as courteous to Leah off stage as Valentin was vile to Marguerite on it. It was something.

  
Whoever Leah's dad might have been, nobody else was an electrician, which became increasingly evident the more we learned about the incident. Which, if I'm honest, wasn't much. Something, somewhere, had blown. Or tripped. Or been tripped. During the concert. Nobody knew for sure whether it was even possible to do this deliberately, but this didn't seem to make any difference. Nobody was talking to Leah.

It also seemed to be ridiculously difficult to get sorted out. Steve, who was good friends with the guy who did the admin for the chaplain, said that this was something to do with the chapel coming under a separate trust from the rest of the university. Until it was fixed, Evensong had to happen _a cappella_ ('Literally,' Steve said, seeing the funny side of that, if nothing else) and an hour earlier for the sake of the daylight.

Leah said, 'At least it makes it easier to get to rehearsals on time,' but she didn't seem to think it was a very good bargain, and I couldn't blame her.

We were rehearsing the first act, and also the principals' bits in the second, this week, so that we'd be ready to set it when we came together with the chorus the next day. I'd gone to sit out in the lounge with Leah while Steve and Harry rehearsed their duets. She seemed surprised, and a little suspicious at first. I didn't like to dwell on chapel choir, or ask how her week had been more generally, because I imagined it had been horrible. Talking about her coursework seemed a bit close to the bone, too. Nor could I really mention her family, or ask about her plans for after graduation. So I said, 'A funny thing happened in labs today,' and told her about Tess accidentally setting fire to her samples.

Leah laughed, and said, 'Sounds more fun than my notation.'

'What are you noting?' I asked.

'Transcribing, really,' she said. 'Renaissance polyphony. Actually it's not that bad.' And there it was: talking about her course wasn't such a no-no after all. She lost me within a few sentence (I'm a decent singer, but any serious musical theory is and always has been beyond me) but I was content just to listen to her talking. She lit up when she spoke about music; she used her hands and her face as much as her words, and I couldn't look away from her. Danny had to call me twice when Charlotte wanted to go through my bit with Steve in Act II.

  
Steve was a bit huffy with me after the rehearsal. I should probably have gone straight home and left him to his huff, but I couldn't resist saying, 'Just because I wasn't waiting impatiently for the bit where you're standing in my way?'

' _No_.' He put our two beers down on the table and looked disdainfully at me. 'Because you were sitting out there with Leah when everybody knows...'

'Knows what?' I demanded.

It was way too loud in the union bar for there to be any point in whispering, but he brought his hand up to mask his mouth in a token gesture as he told me, 'That she blew the electrics half-way through the department concert.'

I was disgusted. 'Show me the proof.'

'Someone from Bristol has got the Voces Occidentes spot. It should have been Claudette, but she didn't get the chance to perform. There wasn't anybody else who had the opportunity.'

'You astound me, Holmes.' I laid the sarcasm on thick. I knew that I could prove the exact opposite: whoever might have had the opportunity, it hadn't been Leah. But that would mean saying where she had been, and I was pretty sure that she didn't want anyone to know. 'So really,' I concluded, a bit weakly, 'everyone's just basing this judgement on the fact that Leah wasn't there in the second half?'

Steve frowned. 'There's no _just_ about it, Ellie. If you could only see past your crush, you'd realise how bad it looks.'

It felt like a blow to the chest: I almost gasped. I changed the subject as quickly as I could. 'Do you know someone called Gabbie?' I asked. 'Long dark hair, quite tall?'

He whistled. 'Gabriella Lovelock? Why do you want to know about _her_?'

I realised too late that I hadn't changed the subject at all, and there was no way that I could explain how I knew about her. 'I, er, saw someone I thought I recognised, but then I heard someone calling her Gabbie, so I knew it couldn't be who I thought it was, and I was wondering who she really was.'

It wasn't exactly the best lie in the history of deception. Steve saw right through it, but, fortunately, went off on a completely wrong track on the other side. 'You really aren't picky, are you, sweetie? Or is it just that your type is “anyone in the Music Department”? But I'm afraid I've got to tell you she's straight.'

I kicked him under the table, but not nearly as hard as he deserved. 'I just like to be sure that I don't waste time with people who don't know how to handle their instruments,' I said.

  
Steve's comment had hit home, and I was still thinking about it three days later. We'd mostly been dealing with the second act at the full rehearsal, and Siebel spends a lot of that trying to reach Marguerite but being turned aside by Mephistopheles, who's playing wingman for Faust. So I was meant to be paying a lot of attention to Leah anyway, and Steve was meant to be thwarting me. I was also having to fend off four girls from the chorus who were inviting me to dance, and the footwork was a bit tricky. So, yes, I was keeping an eye on Leah and where she was, but that was mostly because Danny had told me to. And I was glad to see her smiling. At least, when she did smile, which was only occasionally, that evening.

The fact that I couldn't prove anything niggled at me, and, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I could have been wrong. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be objective about this – even if I wasn't quite sure what that would look like. Crush or no crush. And I honestly was fairly sure that it was no crush.

  
I do a bit of running anyway, when I'm awake early enough. I don't usually parade myself around campus, and running from the Music Department to the chapel was a ridiculous route, but I decided that nobody needed to know that was where I was going. I crossed my fingers and hoped that there wouldn't be too many people around at half past seven in the morning, and left my house in my running gear and carrying my water bottle just as if I were going somewhere perfectly sensible.

Instead, I began at the fire door at the rear of the Music building, and I ran as fast as I dared up the cut-through between the main Claremont building and Claremont Studios, dashed across the grass you're not meant to walk on, took the steps outside the library two at a time, and wound up, panting, at the chapel. Then I turned around and did the whole thing in reverse.

It surprised me how disloyal I felt, not to mention how much of a wally. And then, when I looked at my watch and saw that the whole thing had taken me twenty-three and a half minutes in broad daylight, I was surprised at how relieved I felt. Leah couldn't have done it in less than that in the dark, and I certainly hadn't spent more than a quarter of an hour on the flower song.

I knew now that she couldn't have done it. But it didn't make any difference. I'd always known that. And maybe Steve was right, maybe I did have a crush on her, but that didn't make any difference either. It was just one more thing that I couldn't say anything about. _Oh, by the way, Leah, let me know as soon as you're over Gabbie, because I would be very willing..._ No.

I still didn't really know what to talk to her about at rehearsals, but that didn't stop me looking forward to them all the time I wasn't in them.

  
In what was probably a deliberate strategy, Danny and Charlotte just got on with things as if nothing was wrong. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they received deputations of various concerned citizens. I heard murmurings, though nobody ever approached me directly, even when I wasn't sitting with Leah, making her laugh by telling her about how Imogen was teaching herself to cook, and discussing whether cold-brew tea might be more effective than coffee when it came to finals. I was well known as Steve's friend, but I'd also made it clear that I believed Leah to be innocent. Maybe Steve had put the word around that it wasn't worth arguing with me about it: if _he_ couldn't convince me, nobody could. Arrogant, if so, but in this case technically true.

Danny was slightly removed from Music Department politics anyway, and Charlotte was the original human steamroller. She just ignored things, and for as long as she had her baton in her hand then everyone else ignored them too. Leah might have been a serial killer for all either of them cared: her character was going to heaven, and, no matter what the chorus or anybody else thought, the angels were going to sing her there.

'We're going to keep you off stage,' Charlotte explained. 'Here, and in the church scene. I want that real otherworldly feeling. You're a chorus of angels, and Danny doesn't want any primary school nativity play about it. So we'll have the cameras and you'll be able to see me bring you in. Happy?'

Nobody said they weren't.

'OK, so they way this scene works is that Marguerite is in prison and Faust and Mephistopheles come to get her out. But she doesn't want to go. So there's this trio where they're saying to her, come on, let's get out of here, and she's asking the angels to carry her off. Is there anybody still here who was in _The Sorcerer_? No? I was going to say, think of the bit before the Act I finale, because it's a bit like that, but never mind. Anyway, at the end of all this Mephistopheles says that she's damned, she's going to hell, and then you come in and you sing, 'Redeemed!' It's a flat-out contradiction and I want it absolutely solid. He's wrong, he's one pathetic little demon. There are thousands of you, and you are proclaiming that she's saved. OK! You've got the notes down now, but we do need to do some work on the expression. The French is ' _Sauvée!_ ' which is obviously a lovely open vowel sound, so I want only a hint of an M and a D on the end of 'Redeemed', and a very pure E sound. Imagine it's Italian, an I with an accent. OK! Steve, give us 'Condemned!' Fran, from the beginning of that second system, thank you. Three, four!'

And, under Charlotte's stern eye, they did it. I did it, too, with the other principals: we would need to be in the wings ready for the bows, so it made sense for us to join in. And, just for the duration of those few bars, everything was all right.

  
I was a bit annoyed that Danny and Charlotte had cut the scene where Siebel offers to fight Faust. When I mentioned it to Leah, she said that this was a relief: Marguerite's aria was a big sing. But I'd have liked the chance to defend her honour.

I didn't say any of that, of course. I just promised myself that I'd think about asking her out after the show was over, and listened to her confess that she was getting a bit fed up with plainsong canticles at Evensong, although she liked the Tudor anthems. She looked the tiniest bit defiant when she said that, as if she was daring me to point out that somebody suspected of having sabotaged the chapel wiring system had no right to complain about the subsequent lack of electricity.

But of course she must have known I wouldn't do that.

  
The first dress rehearsal came around quickly. Too quickly. Everything went wrong, but then it always does. It took ages to get the backstage screens working properly, and Danny had to bring the whole chorus several feet forwards when it turned out that he'd got the sightlines wrong and the back row couldn't see Charlotte at all.

At least the costumes looked fabulous. Danny had managed to talk someone from the art school into designing them, and some other people into producing them.

'What's black and white and red all over?' Leah said when she saw it all.

'A newspaper,' I replied automatically.

'No, a sunburnt zebra.'

I groaned. She had a point, though. They'd put me in black, with trousers that reminded me of what my brother used to wear to school, and a scarlet bandanna around my neck. Khadijah had a very glamorous striped trouser suit to go with shiny red heels. Steve, of course, was all in red, an exquisite suit with satin lapels, and shirt and tie in the exact same shade. He'd spent all term growing a goatee and getting it absolutely perfect. Harry had a tatty red dressing gown for the first act, which he would throw off when he became young again, revealing black leather trousers and a shirt only half done up. He looked unfairly good in this get-up, and I was fairly sure that Steve had noticed this fact too.

Leah had a black skirt and a white blouse with full sleeves under a natty little black waistcoat. She was to have her hair tied back with a black ribbon. I thought she looked lovely. Red really wouldn't have been her colour, and I supposed there was also some symbolism going on in the fact that she wasn't wearing any of it. The jewels, though, were magnificently garish plastic rubies, which would look quite subtle from the back of the auditorium.

  
There was something about being in the theatre instead of the union building, about wearing our costumes instead of our everyday clothes, about singing with the orchestra instead of Fran's piano accompaniment, that brought it home to everybody: this was it. Nothing was going to change now; nobody was going to be parachuted in or promoted from the chorus. Leah was Marguerite, and unless she lost her voice or stepped down of her own accord, she was going to be Marguerite all week.

At least, that's the only way I can excuse, or even explain, the comment that one of the chorus made when Charlotte stopped Leah to correct a mistake in the middle of the waltz.

'Charlotte,' the girl said in the convenient silence, 'don't you think that somebody else should be playing Marguerite? Particularly given what we've just heard? _Particularly_ given what we all know?'

Leah went bright red. Harry took an obvious step back from her.

For several seconds, Charlotte stared coldly at the girl who had interrupted. 'No,' she said. 'I don't.'

'Bloody hell,' Steve said to me under his breath, 'that's a bit extreme, even for Fi.'

I was concentrating very hard on not saying anything.

The worst of it was, there were plenty of other people around the stage who clearly agreed with her. It didn't help that Leah then got that bit wrong twice more before Charlotte decided it would be better just to leave it.

I patted Leah on the shoulder when we came off stage, and wished I knew her well enough to do more. Once again, I saw what she looked like when she was trying not to cry, and I wished all sorts of horrible things upon Fi.

She pulled herself together, though, and was as sparkling as the jewels in the third act. When Steve, who couldn't cope with Khadijah suddenly being three inches taller than him, fell over, it provided much-needed comic relief, but I don't believe that anybody went home in a good mood.

  
Things went better at the second dress rehearsal, but there was still a horrible atmosphere. So we were approaching the first night – at least, I was – with more nerves than usual. As always, I wanted it all to be over, and I wished it would never end, but this time round it was overlaid with concern for Leah. The sooner it was over, the sooner she could get out of this toxic stew, but I knew she'd probably never want to see anybody from OpSoc again.

I promised myself that I'd ask her out anyway, but I wasn't feeling hopeful. It was much easier to be Siebel, who could uncomplicatedly adore her.

  
Given all that, nobody was holding out much hope for the opening night, but once we actually got to that point adrenaline kicked in, and by the time the orchestra tuned up we were all properly excited. To add to the first night nerves, there was a rumour buzzing around the dressing rooms: Lucian Campden, the director of Voces Occidentes, had been spotted in the audience. Ironically, none of us in the female principals' dressing room cared all that much: Khadijah knew there wasn't an alto spot going, Leah probably never wanted to hear the name of the group again, and I was more worried about the fact that Nita and Imogen had come to hear me. The dancers hadn't shown up yet, but it wasn't as if they'd care about Lucian Campden.

I wondered whether Harry knew. He was already on stage, ready to declare that his life was meaningless.

There was a bustle in the corridor outside, which was the chorus getting ready to go up for their entrance. Usually they're offstage – Faust hears them through his window – but Danny and Charlotte had decided that the poor things spent enough time in the wings. I could have sung along with them, but I wanted to get my nerves under control before Act II and my first entrance.

Instead, I listened to Harry. It was difficult to judge his performance from the crackly speaker in the dressing room. I combined it with what I'd picked up at rehearsals. Faust is old, jaded, suicidal. But instead of killing himself, he decides to make a deal with the devil – who surprises him by showing up. All I can say is, whatever he was doing, it was paying off. The audience loved him. They loved Steve, too, but I was expecting that. He's a charming git when he wants to be (and I say that in the nicest possible way), and I have a better reason to know than most. Mephistopheles promises him youth and everything that goes with it – and delivers, on the youth part at least, after which Faust goes off to make the best use of it.

  
That's where the rest of the cast comes in.

I always forget how strange it feels when the theatre is full and the lights are blazing in your face, when you know that there are hundreds of eyes looking at you but you can't see a thing. As first appearances go, Siebel's eases into things fairly gently: I was blending into the crowd, drinking with the students, inconspicuous (I could tell myself, anyway) until I opened my mouth.

Mine was the first solo female voice they heard, but Siebel is a boy. I did the blokey 'have a nice war!' stuff with Valentin, and he postured a bit about being Marguerite's brother and the hope of glory. Then Mephistopheles showed up, again, and made it all about him, again. He sang a song about the golden calf. _Siebel avec ténors_ , it says in my score, and it's a lot of fun singing along with the men.

After that it was the moment I'd been waiting for. I mean, the moment that Siebel had been waiting for: Marguerite showed up. I saw her from across the crowd. What's the cliché? Across a crowded room, that's it. Well, I saw her across the crowded stage or across the crowded fairground, depending on your point of view, but that's because I was looking for her. And I never got to her, because first the girls who wanted to waltz with me, and then Mephistopheles himself, kept getting in my way. And then Faust has found her, and it's too late.

By the end of the act I knew: I was going to ask Leah out, and she was going to turn me down.

  
Well, it helped me to get into character for the next act. I'd kept going back and forth on Siebel's mindset here: did he think he had a chance with Marguerite? Danny had left that one up to me, since it didn't have any impact on anyone else's actions. Tonight, I played it as if he knew it was hopeless. I was saying it with flowers, but I had an awful lot to say.

The flowers were quite clever: they had double-sided petals, and upright, they looked red, but the other side was black. When I picked them and held them upside down, they appeared to have withered. I looked at them in horror and dropped the lot, then, staring at my own hands, cursed Mephistopheles. ' _I'll dip my hands in holy water_ ,' I sang, availing myself of a painted fountain on a flat, stage right. The second row of flowers had no such trickery. I gathered them into a bouquet, left them on Marguerite's doorstep, and hoped for the best.

I was meant to make myself scarce after the flower song, but I hung around in the wings to watch Faust and Mephistopheles mess around with the jewel box and to wait for Marguerite's entrance.

She finds the flowers first, of course. ' _Siebel, poor kid!_ ' It hurt. I knew this wasn't real, but I had a nasty feeling that Leah would react in exactly the same way as that when I did pluck up the courage to say something.

Then she finds the jewels, and it's all over. Well, it isn't all over, there are still two acts to go, but Siebel's romantic prospects are out of the picture.

The jewels were, as I think I've mentioned, hideous, but Leah made the most beautiful work of the song, reaching notes that I could only dream of with as little trouble as if she was picking them out on a child's xylophone.

Mephistopheles makes sure of things by getting Martha, Marguerite's neighbour, out of the way (Khadijah was hilarious; she always is in that sort of part), and then bringing down premature night on the whole thing. What good is one little bunch of flowers going to do against that lot?

  
After the interval, of course, Marguerite is pregnant. She goes to church to pray about it, and is rudely interrupted by Mephistopheles and an off stage chorus of demons. The rest of the chorus is on the stage, as priests and nuns. I couldn't join them, as Siebel is needed at the beginning of the next scene.

The soldiers marched back in, their black uniforms overlaid with white bandages and splashes of bright red. I sat out on the apron with my back against the proscenium arch, affecting nonchalance, but glancing over my shoulder very often. I was looking for Valentin. He's as smug as he was before he went away, and Siebel completely cocks up telling him about Marguerite – he ends up begging him to be gentle and rushing off. After that Mephistopheles serenades Marguerite with a song about not opening the door until there's a ring on your finger, which annoys Valentin so much that he comes out to fight a duel with him, with predictable results. Valentin curses Marguerite as he dies, which doesn't help matters much.

  
We got a bit of a breather while the ballet happened. Danny had decided against the Courtesans of Antiquity, so the dancers were just assorted demons in red, white, and black bodysuits. I understood that the dances represented the seven deadly sins, though not in any graphic detail. Mephistopheles drags Faust up to a mountain to watch, and Faust finds the whole thing a bit dull. Part-way through he sees a vision of Marguerite, who's now in prison awaiting execution for having killed her baby.

I knew that this was the bit that Leah felt most self-conscious about. She had no singing in this scene; she had only to walk across the stage (' _glide_ across the stage') and stand there looking at Faust. ('Acting!') It was harder than the first act, because the stakes were higher, and she was acting against Mephistopheles, now, not with him. Meanwhile, the dancers would be doing their thing.

'You're bewildered, you're reproachful, you don't understand why this shitty thing has happened to you!' Danny had directed. Perhaps it would not be so hard for her to get into character, I thought bitterly.

For this entrance Leah wore a white shift and the jewels from the garden scene, now wound snugly around her throat, with one long red tail spilling downwards. I knew that they would glitter horribly under the lights.

She crossed from left to right, silent but striking, then left the stage, followed shortly afterwards by Steve and Harry, while the dancers finished their routine.

  
She was back in the dressing room and undoing the string of beads when we heard a knock on the door.

Khadijah was the one who opened it. 'Steve. Everything OK?'

'Yes, fine,' he said. 'Can I come in?'

Khadijah looked around to check with me and Leah; we glanced at each other and nodded. I stepped forward, but he said, 'I've come to see Leah.'

She raised her eyebrows and turned around in her chair, so that she was facing him head on. 'Oh?'

'You should be the first one to hear this,' he said to her. 'My friend Adam, you know, the one who works with Marcy and the rest of the chaplaincy, texted me about half an hour ago. They had someone in to look at the wiring. Apparently there are things in there that haven't been replaced since about nineteen-fifty, and it's amazing that it didn't go before. So, yeah. It wasn't you. Which you knew. Obviously.'

'Oh,' she said. 'Thank you. Thank you for letting me know.'

Steve looked uncomfortable, which didn't really fit with his scarlet suit. 'I'd like to apologise,' he said.

Leah didn't make him explain what he wanted to apologise _for_ , which I thought was very kind of her. 'How did it get into that state?' she asked instead.

'At a guess,' said Steve, 'it will have been because the chaplaincy assumed that Estates was looking after it, and Estates thought that maintenance was looked after by the chaplaincy trust.'

This meant nothing to me, but Leah was nodding as if it made sense.

  
Harry didn't knock; in fact, he performed the whole thing with much less grace than Steve. 'He's told you? I'm, like, really sorry.'

Leah shrugged helplessly. 'Well,' she said, 'I guess that's it.'

It was all horribly awkward. They all three just stood smiling nervously at each other until Annette knocked at the door and called, 'Act five beginners, please, and has anyone _seen_ Faust and Steve? Oh, there you are.'

'Onwards and upwards,' said Leah, who still looked a bit shell-shocked. The men followed her out of the dressing room, and left me and Khadijah staring at each other as the door swung to behind them.

'I was right,' I said experimentally. I'd always known that I was, but I hadn't dared to think that I might be able to say so.

'You were,' Khadijah said. Suddenly, she grinned. 'Well, thank goodness for that.'

A sudden hum from down the corridor suggested that the news had reached one or both of the chorus dressing rooms. A sudden crescendo suggested that the chorus had spilled out of the dressing rooms and along the corridor.

Annette called over the hubbub, 'Chorus to backstage for the finale, please!'

  
I followed them up, and we all huddled around the grainy screen. Charlotte's face was a blur, but the instructions of her lovely expressive hands were clear enough. Marguerite was kneeling up on the prison bed; Faust and Mephistopheles were trying to persuade her to leave.

' _Con-dem-ned!_ ' From the stage we heard Steve's voice, wickedly full, wallowing in those three gloating syllables. But the whole chorus replied, serenely, ' _Redeemed!_ ', and I sang with them, and the harp and the strings swam up and up to somewhere truth and justice ruled, and suddenly I couldn't follow them into the Easter hymn because my throat was tight and my eyes full of tears. On stage, I knew, the lights were being focused on Leah and becoming brighter and brighter until all that anybody could see from the audience was the white square that was the bed, and Leah kneeling on it.

And the curtain fell.

  
The orchestra leapt whole-heartedly into the drinking song, and the audience was clapping along within a couple of bars. The chorus, the men first and then the women, marched forward and bowed, and fell back a few steps. The dancers did the same thing. Khadijah came in from stage left and Andy from stage right; they met in the middle, held hands, bowed, and moved off to one side. I strode on from stage right to shake Ben by the hand, before we bowed and fell back to the other side. Finally, Harry came on with Leah on his arm, and Steve swaggered on alone, to meet them, catch Leah's spare hand, and bow.

  
My friends were waiting at the stage door, with a large bouquet of chrysanthemums and a bottle of cava. 'Darling!' Imogen exclaimed, 'you were magnificent!'

I don't know why she doesn't go on the stage herself.

'Here,' Nita said. 'For you.' She thrust the flowers and the wine at me.

'Are you going to help me drink that?' I asked.

'Of course.' Imogen pulled a stack of paper cups out of her handbag, and I popped the cork on the cava, and we drank a toast right then and right there to my latest triumph. But I wasn't sure whether it meant anything, yet.

  
Then they said they'd see me at the bar, and I went back to the dressing room. Khadijah was hanging her costume up neatly on the clothes rail. There was a little crowd around Leah, all telling her either that they were very sorry or that they had never really believed it. I left them all to it and dumped the cava on the side, and found a big plastic jug to put my flowers in. Once Khadijah was done I pulled the clothes rail out from the wall a little to give myself the illusion of privacy, and changed back into my jeans and T-shirt. I didn't mind undressing in front of Leah and Khadijah, but half the men's chorus was really too much.

Eventually the room cleared, and there was only Leah left in there with me.

'Ellie?'

I looked up. She was frowning at herself in the mirror as she took her make-up off. 'Yes?' I said.

'Thank you.'

It was no use pretending that I didn't know what she was talking about. 'Oh. Well. You know. It was only what was due to you. I'm sorry everyone else was so horrible.'

'But you seemed to _know_...'

It took me a moment to work out that she hadn't known that I'd known. And everything suddenly looked different.

I came over to her, cleared a couple of make-up compacts aside, and sat down on the edge of the dressing table, facing her. 'I did know,' I confessed. 'I came up to use the practice room that evening, when the concert was in the chapel, and I saw you... talking to someone. I thought you'd seen me, in fact.'

'No.' She shook her head, wonderingly. 'The whole chorus could have marched in with a bass drum and I wouldn't have noticed. But why didn't you _say_?'

'Like I said, I thought you'd seen me. And it seemed like a very private conversation. I decided that I wouldn't say anything unless you asked me to.'

'And would I have asked you to?' she mused aloud. 'No, because I would have been afraid that people would think you'd made it up to protect me.'

'I suppose Gabbie wouldn't have corroborated it?'

A wince. She didn't really like my knowing about Gabbie. 'I wouldn't have asked her to.'

'Ah.'

She nodded. 'Can I ask you to... keep pretending you didn't see anything? Because Gabbie might be a selfish, manipulative cow, but I'm not going to be the one who gets her outed.'

'Of course,' I said, 'if that's what you want.'

'It isn't, really. But it's the best I can do.' She sighed. The whole thing had taken it out of her, I could tell. 'You've been sweet to me, Ellie.'

 _Siebel, poor kid_ , I thought. This might be as good as it ever got. With that in mind, I made a long arm for the cava and sloshed some into Leah's water glass. Then I refilled my own cup. 'Cheers,' I said.

But she hadn't finished. 'Really. I know what they've been saying.'

'What have they been saying?' I asked.

'You know. That you've only been sticking up for me because you... like me.'

'But I do,' I said, before I had a chance to think better of it. 'I like you a lot.'

For the first time, she looked me straight in the eye. 'Really? You like me like that?'

'My acting isn't that good,' I said, thinking of how easy it had been to make a convincing job of Siebel's adolescent adoration.

Her smile broadened to a grin. 'I thought you and Steve -'

'No, not for ages.'

'Oh. Well. Right. In that case.' She picked up the untouched glass of cava and touched it to my paper cup. 'Cheers indeed.'

Without breaking eye contact, we drank, and I felt a sense of thrilling, disbelieving joy spread through me with the bubbles.

Still looking up at me, Leah leaned forward and reached past me to put her glass down on the dressing table, and took my cup from me and put it down too, so she had one arm each side of me. She leaned back again, drawing me to her as she went, and I folded quite suddenly onto her lap, and really there was only one obvious way to go from there, and it was wonderful.

We sat there, kissing and kissing and kissing, until Annette came round the dressing rooms to make sure they were clear, and whistled at us in a friendly kind of way, and I turned my phone on and found that I had three missed calls from Nita and twelve texts from Imogen.

  
Danny said after the show was all over that it never was quite as good as that first night. But I disagreed. And I still do.

**Author's Note:**

> Synopsis of 'Faust': https://www.charles-gounod.com/vi/oeuvres/operas/faust.htm   
> (The scene that Ellie complains about Danny and Charlotte cutting would have come at the beginning of Act IV.)
> 
> The waltz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRITskQsLU  
> The flower song ('Faites-lui mes aveux'): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3zy6O2AYE  
> The final scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZFR_zNwv4


End file.
